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B. Madoff, and Proud of It

Lawyers for B. Madoff of Manhattan were in federal court on Thursday asking a panel of judges to spring him from jail while he awaits sentencing for his crimes. The judges did not rule right away. But B. Madoff of Manhattan hopes that they say no.

There is no contradiction here.

B. Madoff with the lawyers is, as you may have guessed, Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi schemer. The other B. Madoff produces commercials and documentaries. He is listed in the Manhattan phone book as B. Jeffrey Madoff. The B stands for Ben.

This B. Madoff is no relation to the master swindler. He pronounces his name differently. His is MAD-off. The other guy is MADE-off, a pronunciation that has led to obvious one-liners too numerous to count.

For months, B. Jeffrey Madoff has received phone calls, dozens and dozens of them, from people who saw the listing for him in the Manhattan directory, figured that he might be the infamous Bernard and decided to tell him off. The calls, Mr. Madoff said, have come “at all hours of the day and night,” generally from “people who were either upset or unhinged or both.”

“I got a package at my office, which I returned to the post office because it was addressed to Bernard Madoff, with no return address and a label that looked like a kidnap note,” he said. He never opened it. What were the odds on it being something good?

With Bernard Madoff behind bars since he pleaded guilty last week to running a vast swindle, the angry calls have been less frequent. Let the man stay in jail, Ben Madoff said. To him, it is a matter of justice.

But it is also likely that if Bernard were allowed to go back to his East Side penthouse, the crank callers might return in droves. Rationality is not a guiding force with some of those people. The other day, Ben Madoff’s phone rang at 4:30 in the morning. “I’d hope that if you’re angry enough at him to want place a call,” he said, “you might follow the news closely enough to realize that he’s at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, not on the Upper West Side.”

“A surprising number of callers are wounded victims who were just at a loss,” he said. “I feel for them.” But others are “hateful.” They include some who have used the scandal as “a camouflaged opportunity” to spew anti-Semitic venom, he said.

Last week, he took a call from a woman in Illinois. “She said, ‘Are you Bernard Madoff?’ ” Ben Madoff said. “I said: ‘No, I’m not. You have the wrong number.’ And she said, ‘Are you a Jew, too?’ ” He hung up.

These are probably not the best of times for anyone named Madoff, even those who do not share a first initial with the crook. Most Madoffs whom we contacted in and around the city were reluctant to talk, or did not respond to messages left for them. One woman had a friend call us back to make sure that she would not be mentioned.

It has to be a burden to bear a name that has become so thoroughly reviled. But Charles Ponzi could assure the various Madoffs that time lives up to its reputation as a healer.

Mr. Ponzi, 65, is a retired businessman living in Watervliet, N.Y., near Albany. He has the same name as, but is not related to, the con man, who died in 1949. When he was younger, Mr. Ponzi said by phone, people often asked if he was connected to the swindler. “Then it went into a lull,” he said. “Until this idiot.”

That would be Bernard Madoff.

Not that the association with infamy has been all bad for Ben Madoff. Three weeks ago, he wrote about the name confusion for The Huffington Post. That article produced dozens of reader comments, and led to an invitation to submit more articles on other subjects. “It’s imposed a writing discipline that I never really imposed on myself before,” he said. That’s a plus.

ON the negative side, he could live without law firm ads — like one running under the headline “Madoff Ponzi Victim?” — that pop up when you do a Google search for his company, Madoff Productions. And though he is 60 and could not be mistaken in any way for the 70-year-old Bernard Madoff, he is skittish enough to have asked not to be photographed. Similarly, he rejected a TV network’s request for an on-camera interview.